Christine Flowers: Little Sister of the Poor earn victory for women in U.S. Supreme Court

At one point like many Catholic girls, I dreamed of becoming a nun. Those were big dreams by the way, since my ideas encompassed the cloistered life. No short skirts and hair-peeking-out-of-bonnets for me. I was aiming for the monastic ideal, a poor man’s version of Dolores Hart (without the prior movie career, the beauty or the actual vocation.)

Alas, I soon realized that something as prosaic as an attachment to long hair would forever derail my embrace of the religious. Notwithstanding my personal squeamishness, most of my childhood heroines wore a habit. Many of them still do.

Having studied under the Mercy nuns for a decade, I’m partial to their mission of community service. My years at Merion Mercy taught me that God is seen as often in good works as he is in prayer (which shows how spectacular a failure I would have been in the cloister.)

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In the 1970s, I had the example of nuns like Sister Pat, Sister Honora, and Sister Suzanne who taught music in the inner city, ladled out soup to the homeless and counseled troubled women. I never met Sister Mary Scullion who established Project H.O.M.E. more than 20 years ago, but I remember hearing about her through the Merion grapevine all those years ago, before she’d become one of Time’s most influential people and got a Wikipedia article all for herself.

I mean no disrespect. That woman will join Mother Theresa in the canon of saints for her work. Many of the sisters who have lived more humbly, out of the public glare, have done just as much to redeem the debased human spirit as Sister Mary, and she would be the first to sing their praises. Generations of us in Delaware County can attest to it as well.

This is why I was so elated to hear that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Catholic school alumna herself, had granted a request to stay the birth control mandate of Obamacare. The mandate was supposed to go into effect on Wednesday. The stay is particularly important because it was issued to, you guessed it, nuns.

How ironic that women who will never use birth control showed women who demand free birth control that strength, responsibility and the ability to control one’s destiny include the ability to say “I will not pay for something that violates my religious beliefs.”

The particular nuns who requested the stay are the Little Sisters of the Poor, who run a home for the aged in Denver, Colo. This is an order of sisters who operate nursing homes and facilities for low-income elderly both in the United States and abroad.

They argued that under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the contraceptive mandate imposed an undue or substantial burden on their right to worship. The lower court refused to grant the stay, so those little nuns took their battle all the way to the Supreme Court. Perhaps the justice who used to wear a uniform and saddle shoes was intimidated by the holy petitioners. More likely, this most intelligent of women (or as she once described herself, a ‘wise Latina’) realized that the contraceptive mandate raised serious questions about religious freedom.

Justice Sotomayor gave the Obama administration three days to challenge the stay, ordering the parties to appear before her this past Friday.

While I am delighted that a justice on the highest court in the land essentially said there were grave problems with forcing an unwilling organization to provide free birth control, some of which acts as an abortifacent, there is a greater lesson to be learned from Sotomayor’s move.

And it is this.

For far too long, women have pinned their claim to dignity and self-worth on their ability to manage their own ovaries. It has become received wisdom that unless females have the right to determine when and where and how they will become (or will avoid becoming) pregnant, we are slaves to biology. Some of my more vocal sisters would just call us slaves, period.

The Sisters of the Poor and the hundreds of millions of women around the world and of our own personal memories put the lie to that presumption rather handily.

They have shown that true independence comes from fighting for your right to be free from a government mandate that crushes your conscientious objections into so much administrative dust. They reach out to the world to lift it up, to heal its sick, to teach its ignorant, to comfort its dying and to mourn its dead.

Unlike the women who clamor for free birth control and raise this up to some sort of constitutional right, if not sacrament, nuns do what they do without any consideration of “what’s in it for me.”

Sometimes, they get a lot of positive press, like when they defy the Vatican and appear a bit more “socially liberal” than what you would expect from a group of holy women. At other times, the vocal female defenders of the nation’s nuns are silent, as they have been in this instance. Nancy Pelosi didn’t wave the pom poms for their “independence.” NOW had nothing to say about their “courage.” And the female cacophony that greeted the filibuster of Wendy Davis has turned to a dead and dreadful silence.

I wrote this before Justice Sotomayor considered the government’s arguments supporting the mandate. I did so because the ultimate result of that Friday hearing, while legally important, doesn’t change the point of this column.

There are those in life who look inward and say, “I matter, I demand that you give me what I deserve!” There are others who look outward and say, “You matter, what can I give you?” I may not have measured up to their standards, and I might have put too much emphasis on esoteric irrelevancies, but I know one thing for sure: the slaves are not the ones on their knees to God.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.